Law Enforcement’s Apple Security Hysteria: About Border Searches?

Border Zone MapAs I noted the other day, Apple just rolled out — and Google plans to match with its next Android release — passcode protected encryption for its cell phone handsets.

Last night WSJ had a story quoting some fairly hysterical law enforcement types complaining mightily not just that Apple is offering its customers security, but that it is a marketing feature.

Last week’s announcements surprised senior federal law-enforcement officials, some of whom described it as the most alarming consequence to date of the frayed relationship between the federal government and the tech industry since the Snowden revelations prompted companies to address customers’ concerns that the firms were letting—or helping—the government snoop on their private information.

Senior U.S. law-enforcement officials are still weighing how forcefully to respond, according to several people involved in the discussions, and debating how directly they want to challenge Apple and Google.

One Justice Department official said that if the new systems work as advertised, they will make it harder, if not impossible, to solve some cases. Another said the companies have promised customers “the equivalent of a house that can’t be searched, or a car trunk that could never be opened.”

Andrew Weissmann, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation general counsel, called Apple’s announcement outrageous, because even a judge’s decision that there is probable cause to suspect a crime has been committed won’t get Apple to help retrieve potential evidence. Apple is “announcing to criminals, ‘use this,’ ” he said. “You could have people who are defrauded, threatened, or even at the extreme, terrorists using it.”

I think the outrage about the stated case — that law enforcement will not longer be able to have Apple unlock a phone with a warrant — is overblown. As Micah Lee points out, the same data will likely be available on Apple’s Cloud.

But despite these nods to privacy-conscious consumers, Apple still strongly encourages all its users to sign up for and use iCloud, the internet syncing and storage service where Apple has the capability to unlock key data like backups, documents, contacts, and calendar information in response to a government demand. iCloud is also used to sync photos, as a slew of celebrities learned in recent weeks when hackers reaped nude photos from the Apple service. (Celebrity iCloud accounts were compromised when hackers answered security questions correctly or tricked victims into giving up their credentials via “phishing” links, Cook has said.)

And the stuff that won’t be on Apple’s Cloud will largely be available from a user’s phone provider — AT&T and Verizon will have call records and texts, for example. So one effect of this will be to put warrant decisions into a review process more likely to be scrutinized (though not in the case of AT&T, which has consistently proven all to happy to share data with the Feds).

Which is why I think the hysteria is either overblown or is about something else.

It may be that this prevents NSA from getting into handsets via some means we don’t understand. Matthew Green lays out how this change will bring real security improvement to your phone from all matter of hackers.

But the most immediate impact of this, I suspect, will be seen at borders — or rather, the government’s expansive 100 mile “border zone,” which incorporates roughly two-thirds of the country’s population. At “borders” law enforcement works under a warrant exception that permits them to search devices — including cell phones — without a warrant, or even any articulable suspicion.

And while it is the case that really aggressive security wonks can and do encrypt their phones now, it is not the default. Which means most people who cross an international border — or get stopped by some authority in that border zone — have their phone contents readily available to those authorities to search. Authorities routinely use their expanded border authority to obtain precisely the kinds of things at issue here, without any suspicion. The terrorist watchlist guidelines (see page 68), for example, note that border encounters may provide evidence from “electronic media/devices observed or copied,” including cell phones.

In 2011, DHS whipped out similarly hysterical language about what horribles actually requiring suspicion before searching a device might bring about.

[A]dding a heightened [suspicion-based] threshold requirement could be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefit. First, commonplace decisions to search electronic devices might be opened to litigation challenging the reasons for the search. In addition to interfering with a carefully constructed border security system, the litigation could directly undermine national security by requiring the government to produce sensitive investigative and national security information to justify some of the most critical searches. Even a policy change entirely unenforceable by courts might be problematic; we have been presented with some noteworthy CBP and ICE success stories based on hard-to-articulate intuitions or hunches based on officer experience and judgment. Under a reasonable suspicion requirement, officers might hesitate to search an individual’s device without the presence of articulable factors capable of being formally defended, despite having an intuition or hunch based on experience that justified a search.

That is, DHS thinks it should be able to continue to search your phone at the border, because if it had to provide a rationale — say, to get a warrant — it might have to disclose the dodgy watchlisting policies that it uses to pick whose devices to search without any cause.

In other words, I’m arguing that the most immediate impact of this will be to lessen the availability of data increasingly obtained without a warrant, and given that the alternate means — administrative orders and warrants — require actual legal process, may mean these things will not be available at all.

If I’m right, though, that’s not a technical impediment. It’s a legal one, one which probably should be in place.

Update: Argh! This is even worse fear-mongering. A former FBI guy says he used intercepted communications to find kidnappers.

Once we identified potential conspirators, we quickly requested and secured the legal authority to intercept phone calls and text messages on multiple devices.

Then claims losing an entirely unrelated ability to search — for data stored on, and only on, handsets — would have prevented them from finding that kidnap victim.

Last week, Apple and Android announced that their new operating systemswill be encrypted by default. That means the companies won’t be able to unlock phones and iPads to reveal the photos, e-mails and recordings stored within.

It also means law enforcement officials won’t be able to look at the range of data stored on the device, even with a court-approved warrant. Had this technology been used by the conspirators in our case, our victim would be dead.

Instead of proving this guy would be dead, the story instead proves that this is not the most pressing information.

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5 replies
  1. wallace says:

    quote”Andrew Weissmann, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation general counsel, called Apple’s announcement outrageous, because even a judge’s decision that there is probable cause to suspect a crime has been committed won’t get Apple to help retrieve potential evidence.”unquote

    aaaaaawh. Poor babies. In which case, they’ll simply fabricate evidence using parallel construction and the DOJ cockroaches will lie through their teeth for them to Judges, cause they know, even if their caught, NO ONE will hold them accountable, ..EVAH.

    http://www.pogo.org/our-work/reports/2014/hundreds-of-justice-attorneys-violated-standards.html

    quote”If I’m right, though, that’s not a technical impediment. It’s a legal one, one which probably should be in place.”unquote

    It IS in place. In the Fourth Amendment. In effect, within that 100 mile “constitution free” perimeter around the entire US of A, the Congress BURNED the Constitution. I don’t understand how in the fuck they can cordon off a part of America whereby the Forth Amendment is VOID? To me, the “interior border” should be marked as such with HUGE signs. “Warning: you are now leaving America and entering an area controlled by forces outside the purview of the American Constitution. ”

    Furthermore, what’s to keep these repugnant traitors from kicking in doors and searching your home WITHOUT a warrant too?

    These scumbag sonsabitches make me sick to my stomach.

  2. orionATL says:

    the entire american policing population needs to learn a few things:

    – they are not entitled to catch criminals. that is their job but it does put them in line for special preferences in invasive, abusive practices and constitutuional violations while doing their job.

    – substantial numbers of police behave viciously and illegally toward the populations they are policing and should themselves be subject to arrest and detention, but society gives them an unwarranted free-pass to brutalize, terrorize, steal money from, arrest and kill on pretext.

    – it is contemptible to hear police over-and-over whine aloud about their safety and their right to “defend” themselves. then exploiting their fears for their safety to serve as a shield from well-deserved arrest and prosecution.

    the american policing population, protected by professionally corrupt prosecutors, has become in toto a brutal, authoritarian force, a first, firm step toward dictatorship of the plutocracy.

  3. Anon says:

    It also means law enforcement officials won’t be able to look at the range of data stored on the device, even with a court-approved warrant. Had this technology been used by the conspirators in our case, our victim would be dead.

    This makes no sense. With a warrant you can compel evidence, like say an encryption code, so this is only an impediment if they need to get the data without a warrant or if they believe that invoking the 5th amendment would get you out of a warrant. I’m not sure if the courts have ruled on this or not.

  4. Anon says:

    In general we should not be surprised that they are complaining about this. They have power. Apple and Google are taking some of that away. Of course they see it as a problem but as U.S. Jurisprudence has long noted the claim that we could always conceivably catch bad people by depriving others of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness is horseshit. The British tried it with general warrants and, not surprisingly, spent most of their time ransacking pubs not finding criminals. If they do feel more comfortable in a state with no privacy then they should read up on the USSR

  5. USSA says:

    Early next year the US has to report to its last vestige of rule of law, the Human Rights Committee, on its compliance with Article 17, freedom from arbitrary interference with privacy. The US government harps on the word arbitrary in that article because they believe it’s a highly restrictive criterion. USG tries to ignore the necessity and proportionality tests imposed by the Committee because the government fails them right off the bat. But they can’t finesse arbitrary interference, that’s the supreme law of the land. So they write secret laws of ridiculous ambiguity and say, See, our interference is not arbitrary.

    But DHS left their fly open by formally trying to prevent “litigation challenging the reasons for the search.” This is the textbook legal definition of arbitrary conduct. They are not just opposed to a particular law, but any law or even reason for their interference.

    This is a terminally degenerate police state. Conventional international law in such a case is useful not for promoting reform but for delegitimating and supplanting the state. You don’t need ACLU anymore, you need Charta 77.

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